


so many days without the sun

by entitled



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Everyone x Everyone - Freeform, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, but so much love, mostly just everyone loving everyone plus a little sadness, nobody dies in a permanent way though, sometimes platonic sometimes not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-13 00:31:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12971763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entitled/pseuds/entitled
Summary: Darcy's death was not supposed to go like this. It had all been her plan to begin with. How could she forget everything?Or: The one where they all live many lives and love each other in every incarnation.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is a blend of so many things but yeah, massively au, only canon-compliant in the most tangential and inconsistent of ways, hope you enjoy x

Darcy dies inside the cathedral. The whole city quakes with gunfire and explosions. The stones of the beautiful building have been pocked inside and out with bullets. The walls look unwell but they hold fast the infirm and the young within their walls. The stained glass of their holy sanctuary gives the elderly a strange glow, the cheeks of young children and infants become incandescent. Darcy dies not from injury but simply her heart slowing to a gentle finish. She’s the last of this round to go.

 

When Thor comes to take her, her body is still warm. She doesn’t have many memories left, so even though he watched her drink the serum many years ago, he worries it won’t work the same as it had with the others. He picks her up and she feels like a bird, shrunken and thin with age. He wraps his thick cloak around her as they depart the invaded city unseen by friend and foe.

 

He gets word of her passing to as many of the others as he can, conveys his concerns, though they already felt her absence. Steven and James are still unaccounted for, though the others are adamant that the pair are still alive. Thor has yet been able to find them.

 

\--

 

“Darcy!” The tiny woman in the lab only becomes visible as she springs out from beneath a heavily leaning tower of paper. With a giant grin on her face the definitely crazy, definitely scientist woman spreads her arms wide as though she wants to hug Darcy. Darcy stares at the bright blue lab coat the woman is wearing. It somehow doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be that colour.

 

“Uh, yeah,” Darcy looks down to check that she’s not still wearing her work tag. As though people who bought takeaway coffee actually cared about the names of the casual workers who provided them with their caffeine. She isn’t wearing her nametag. “How’d you know?”   

 

The woman’s smile dims, but only a tiny bit. “You’re, uh, actually the only person who applied for the role.” The woman – who Darcy figures must be Dr Foster, astrophysicist-in-need – scrunches her nose. “So I figured that, since nobody really comes down to the lab unless they have an appointment or I already know them through work or whatever, seeing an unfamiliar face given my recent advertisement makes it highly probable that you’re Darcy Lewis.”

 

“Right.”

 

“So, you’re hired!”

 

\--

 

Jane gets a message to the others. Typical of Jane, it’s by no means cryptic, but still opens up more questions than it answers.

 

_I’ve found her. She doesn’t remember anything._

\--

 

“The Hydra is coming for us, no question.” Steve paces the train car, his stress pushing him to the limits of his English. Gaelic threatens to spill from his mouth, but only Bucky would have any chance of understanding him. “They have no regard for the death and destruction they will cause in order to get to us.”

 

“The collateral damage means nothing to them.” Tony is sitting on one of the dining tables, his loafers kicked onto the floor beneath him as he swings his legs back and forth. “This Great War will kill everyone else before it does us.”

 

“So what will you do?” Thor rumbles from where he leans against the carriage wall. He is invested in the outcome but reserves initiative for the rest of the group to take.

 

“We will split up.” Darcy speaks. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor while Jane braids her hair into a complex system that’s supposed to contain its wildness. She’s wearing trousers like a man and thick-soled boots. Jane is also wearing boots but has opted for a finely-woven blue dress with neatly embroidered yellow wildflowers around the collar and cuffs. Bucky lays on the plush-carpeted floor of the carriage with his head in Darcy’s lap. His shirt is untucked and his jacket’s location unknown. Darcy taps out a little rhythm on Bucky’s forehead as she leans back into Jane’s touch. “It is our best hope of individual survival and also diffusing the –”

 

“– the powder keg of the Balkans?” Tony cuts in. Bruce shushes him. Darcy sends him a look but nods.

 

“When we are concentrated together, so too is our impact. If we disperse, it could ease the pressure on the region and also force The Hydra to distribute their forces more widely in pursuit of us.”

 

“But then the next time around, we are back to square one, aren’t we?” Clint tilts his head questioningly at Darcy. He’s perched atop the bar with Sam leaning against it. Clint’s knees bracket Sam’s shoulders.

 

A soft smile plays on Jane’s lips as she expertly twists Darcy’s hair. She’s already boarded Darcy’s train of thought, and waits patiently while her cousin and dearest friend joins the dots for everyone else.

 

“We’ll remember next time.” Darcy flings a hand in Thor’s direction. Thor joins Jane in understanding with a smile of his own. Steve stops pacing and stares at Darcy. “Asgardian memory juice, right Thor?”

 

The god laughs. “Not what it’s called but yes, sweet Darcy, that does approximate its effects quite succinctly.”

 

Steve’s eyes are overcome with fondness and he stretches out to stroke Darcy’s hair in appreciation of her wonderful brain. Jane swats his hand away without looking at him.

 

“When I’m done, Rogers.” Jane closes another braid with a sigh. “Don’t screw it up before I’m even finished.” Darcy grins up at Steve as Bucky tugs teasingly on his trouser leg. Steve rolls his eyes, relieved at the loosening in his chest. They weren’t trapped. Not really. They would find a way out of it all.

 

“How do you suggest we communicate?” Natasha asks.

 

“Oh, that one’s easy!” Darcy claps her hands together. “We’ll do it like Jane and I used to do in our letters!”

 

“Aww, no, Darcy,” Bucky whines, rolling out of her lap and smoothly to his feet. “You know I can’t do that ridiculous backwards stuff.”

 

\--

 

Bucky never learns to handwrite his cursive backwards. He’s the first to die that round, after Thor acquires the so-called memory juice and they each drink from the same cup before parting ways. They all feel the tuberculosis stealing him with the steady certainty of the tide coming in. _At least The Hydra can’t touch him._ Steve writes them all in his backwards loop. They split off mostly in pairs. And then Bucky is gone.

 

And then he’s back. A squalling bruiser of a baby boy born in Brooklyn.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things will get a little less choppy in the next chapter but for now i am enjoying jumping around a bit

Tony and Jane were cousins one time, when Jane’s mother and Tony’s father are born as siblings in central Italy. Jane is always an only child, this time born just outside of Oxford. She is related to Darcy through her father’s side. Darcy jokes that Jane and Tony could trace their family history back to da Vinci, with their renaissance minds and enthusiasm for invention.

 

\--

 

“So, what happened?” Steve crouches next to where Darcy sits on the couch with her head between her knees.

 

“The serum carries the memories you die in possession of.” Thor presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose, looking uncharacteristically frustrated. “It appears Darcy died of a degenerative brain condition which meant she had only a few memories left inside her. Most of you had been absent from her life for many years at that point.” Thor makes eye contact with Steve who seems focused on breathing deeply, guilt creasing his face. “It will take her some time, like it did with all of you before we began using the serum.”

 

“Memory juice!” Darcy blurts out, jerking her head upwards in a swoop of tangled hair.

 

“You remember that?” Steve turns his head to stare at Darcy with his impossibly blue eyes. She swallows roughly. Darcy had always known through social studies and pop culture that Captain America was incredibly earnest but she wasn’t prepared for all ten thousand volts of his earnestness to be directed right at her face.

 

“Uh, no?” She tries, wincing at the suddenly crestfallen captain. Disappointing America’s most treasured figure – past and present – was not on her to-do list, but nonetheless ticked off. An open book, that man. “It just… I don’t know why I said it, actually.” She said, trying to improve the situation on Captain America’s face, unsuccessfully. Everyone else in the room looked at Darcy like they _did_ know exactly why she had said what she’d said.

 

“I say we round-robin our time with Darcy to stimulate her hippocampus and basal ganglia.” Jane suggests.

 

“Likewise if we incorporate functional movement and visual fixation with prompts we can access some of those processes in her cerebellum.” Tony adds.

 

“Yes!” Jane has procured a pen from somewhere and begins scribbling on her hand and forearm, muttering words like “saccades” and something about “alternating axials.” Darcy could hardly believe they were talking about her brain this casually. She thought Jane was an astrophysicist.

 

“What about the neocortex and amygdala functions?” Tony muses, stretching his fingers out in front of himself like a holograph of Darcy’s brain just might appear between them. "We don't have all the time in the world."

 

“Music.” Bruce posits from where he’s standing behind the kitchen island, nursing a cup of tea. “And smells, particularly those associated with the most recent life.”

 

“Of course!” Jane and Tony say together. Darcy shifts uncomfortably on the couch, tempted to return her head to back between her legs.

 

“Some exposure to high pressure situations may force her amygdala to access things which are presently hidden from her consciousness.” Natasha murmurs, in the Natasha way that is both quiet and intensely audible.

 

“Uh, maybe not?” Darcy pipes up, certain that a situation the Black Widow would consider high pressure would certainly be something both extremely dangerous and brain-explodingly impossible for a normal person like herself.

 

\--

 

They always change, every iteration of themselves slightly different. Steve always has blue eyes, though. He doesn’t always grow tall but he always has a tendency to sketch. Darcy is seldom anything but short statured and dark haired. Of all of them, Natasha possesses the greatest capacity for physical variation, as though every aspect of her appearance randomised with each birth. Her gaze remains the same every time though, even if it emerges from eyes of different colours. Tony claims that, no matter what life he lives, he always has and will continue to hate asparagus.

 

\--

 

“Doesn’t it feel odd sometimes?” Jane asks Darcy.

 

Darcy rests her head against the side of her goat, Gertrude, as she milks and thinks simultaneously. It isn’t the answer that proves difficult for Darcy, but finding the right words to shape it.

 

“No…” she hums as Gertrude shifts her hooves. “No, because it’s all just love, isn’t it?” Jane’s brow crinkles the same way it always does when she is folding a question over in her mind. She places an authoritative hand on her own goat’s rump. Harriet leans into Jane’s hand and sighs.

 

“But won’t it feel strange next time?” Darcy and Bucky are siblings this time. They had been married a couple lifetimes ago.

 

“No, because that will be next time. Our fraternal love will carry us through this life and perhaps in the next it will be a different form again.” Darcy pauses for a while, gently stroking Gertrude’s flanks. “It’s just different faces on the same creature.”

 

“Hmm.” Jane stares at Harriet’s ear in deep thought.

 

“It’s like that time you and dear Bruce married.” Darcy, finished with milking, stands and scoops her pail and stool up together. “You have those memories with you now, but they don’t necessarily colour your relationship with him in this life.”

 

Jane’s face lights with comprehension, then she cringes. “I don’t think I would do that again, though.”

 

\--

 

When Darcy hits Thor with her taser, she is not aware of his godly status. She doesn’t know Jane had summoned him. Darcy doesn’t know that the garbled yelling from the large man who’d just fallen from the sky is actually what her name sounds like in Thor’s mother tongue. What she does know is that a huge dude is stumbling towards them, eyes rolling like a horse’s, bellowing at the top of his lungs. What she does know is that self-defence is important and that she likes her new boss.

 

\--

 

Jane is not new to Thor’s stories. She is familiar with Yggdrasil and the battles and shapeshifters and the Norns. Despite the fact that she can pull the threads of countless memories of Thor’s voice weaving tales both old and new into the present,

he is always delighted to hear him recite them again. She is always excited to wield each successive generation’s most cutting-edge technology in the pursuit of meaning in the Big Beyond.


End file.
